Canva has acquired two companies founded by the same team: Simtheory, an AI agent and collaboration platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. Both were built by brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously founded the vacation rental platform Stayz before selling it to Fairfax Media.
The acquisitions signal Canva’s intent to move well beyond design. Simtheory brings multi-model AI infrastructure that lets teams build assistants, automate workflows, and run agentic systems across business applications. Ortto contributes a customer data platform with marketing automation across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, and more, serving over 11,000 customers in 190 countries.
Canva COO Cliff Obrecht framed Simtheory as the engine for transforming Canva from a design platform with AI features into an AI platform with design at its core. Ortto slots into Canva Grow, the company’s marketing lifecycle product, alongside recent acquisitions MagicBrief, MangoAI, and Doohly.
Canva says it will show the results of its Simtheory work at Canva Create on April 16, describing the upcoming announcement as the biggest evolution in the company’s history. The platform currently counts 265 million monthly active users across more than 190 countries.
